SpaceX, Nasa mark successful launch of 8th long-duration crew mission to ISS

SpaceX on Sunday night made history after successfully launching a rocket from Florida, carrying three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on their way to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month science mission in Earth's orbit.

The Falcon 9 rocket, equipped with an autonomous Crew Dragon capsule named Endeavor, took off from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa) Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida, at exactly 10:53pm EST.

Nasa-SpaceX's webcast showed the 25-story Falcon rocketship, Endeavor, ascending from its launch tower, NBC News reported.

The upper stage delivered Endeavor to its initial orbit nine minutes after liftoff, with live video from the cabin showing the four crew members in helmeted white-and-black flight suits.

Matthew Dominick, a US Navy test pilot, and Dr Michael Barratt, a Nasa veteran and physician, have joined the latest ISS crew, marking their first trip to orbit and serving as mission pilot.

The team includes Nasa astronaut Jeanette Epps, an aerospace engineer and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) technical intelligence officer, and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, a former military aircraft engineer. Both of them are spaceflight rookies.

The four crew members are scheduled to reach the ISS early on Tuesday after a 16-hour flight, docking with the orbital laboratory some 250 miles (420km) above Earth.

Designated Crew 8, the mission marks the eighth long-duration ISS team that Nasa has flown aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the private rocket venture founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk and headquartered near Los Angeles began sending US astronauts to orbit in May 2020.

The current ISS occupants, Crew 7, will depart the space station a week after Crew 8's arrival which will remain until the end of August, performing around 250 experiments in the microgravity environment.